John Ruskin was one of the great Victorians, established while
still yound as an arbiter of taste in painting and architecture and
as one of the greatest of all writers of English prose. When he was
forty he decided to abandon the field in which his reputation had
been secured in order to awaken the world to the peril of
devastation which, he believed, would follow its preoccupation with
profit and its subservience to a false economic doctrine. He
regarded his social criticism as a duty, reluctantly accepted, to a
society which had abandonded the traditional and religious values
that had been the foundation of its civilisation. Ruskin's labour,
to which he devoted the rest of his life, was to bring a searching
intelligence, considerable learning and a moral concern to
providing a ruthless criticism of the values of Victorian
England.

John Ruskin's Labour examines the relationship of his
social criticism to his moral and aesthetic judgments.